‘Boot camp’ hopes to increase gaming time between moms and kids

Humphrey Cheung, 24th July 2007

New York (NY) – Kids these days usually play video games with their friends and sometimes their fathers, but moms could soon be joining in on the grenade tossing, alien killing fun. Tomorrow, a new gaming boot camp sponsored by AOL Games and GameDaily hopes to increase the amount of quality time between eleven mothers and their children.

GameDaily Editor Libe Goad is a mother herself and will be running the camp which will be held at New York’s Rockefeller Plaza. The attending families will be treated to the latest console and PC games and will compete against each other for some valuable prizes.

Goad told us that gamers are no longer social outcasts and added, “Gaming is now mainstream and stopped being something done by a nerdy dude in a basement.”

But mothers have generally been behind the curve on this gaming trend and Goad hopes the boot camp will open up their eyes and help them gain back hours of bonding time by playing games with their kids. “Moms aren’t afraid of going to a movie with their kids, but are usually afraid of picking up a game controller,” Goad said.

Goad hasn’t yet met the mothers and told us the event should be “very interesting”. She’ll plans on leading off with the Nintendo Wii which she says is “easy to pick up and play”. But she’ll also show off multiplayer games on the PS3 and Xbox 360, namely the musical hit Guitar Hero.

Could this camp make mothers fall in love with gaming, causing them to sequester themselves in the bedroom shooting up aliens in Resistance: Fall of Man? Goad told us that the goal of the boot camp wasn’t to turn the mothers into gaming maniacs, but to make games more accessible, adding, “Maybe they will fall in love with games, but I hope they at least won’t be as hesitant to play.”